It was Friday night, a little after 8 p.m. and I was missing him.

He was in Kansas City, still, and I was in Tennessee.  I had come back earlier in the week to make sure the annual report was bound and finished and ready to be presented.  I dropped it off at my boss’ house on my way home from the office and, that evening, my cell phone chimed with a message from her saying she was good to go with them.  In other words, my weekend had just freed up.

I immediately started looking up last minute flights to Kansas City.  They were, of course, more than I wanted to pay and after seeing that it would take me eleven hours just to drive there, I decided to just give up on the idea.  After all, we had gotten to spend two days together earlier that week and he would be back in a few months, right?

I had started to get ready for bed when I began thinking about regret.  I imagined him getting on that plane back to England on Monday morning and me having known that I could have gone to see him for an extra 32 hours.  Before I knew what I was doing, I started throwing things in my suitcase and asking Miss Seventeen if she was sure she wouldn’t mind to spend the night with her best friend (Miss Thirteen was in juvenile detention, but that’s another story for another day).  Miss Seventeen couldn’t wait to get to her friend’s house and, after a quick call to the foster care agency to let them know I was going MIA for a couple of days, I headed out towards the Nashville airport, planning to buy my ticket when I arrived at 1 a.m.

When I was about two-thirds of the way there, I found out that, if I flew out of Atlanta, I would be able to have an extra two hours with him before I had to get back home for work.  I pulled over at a McDonald’s, bought my flight right there and headed towards Atlanta.  I got to Atlanta around 3 a.m., slept on a bench for a couple of hours before getting ready in the bathroom, flew to Kansas City and, with the help of some friends, gave British Boyfriend the surprise of his life when he walked out of the bathroom to find me standing in his hotel room.  We went on to have the best 34 hours together and I don’t regret going at all.  As I told him when I got back to Tennessee the next day, it was worth every minute and every penny just to see his reaction when he realized I had come back to spend a bit more time with him.

But I’ll let him tell you about it himself.

Is he not the cutest thing ever?

From an email he sent while I was still asleep this morning –

“… but sometimes you know in your heart that you’ve found {…} happiness {…} and you’ll fight every inch of the way to grasp that happiness in both your hands. 

And that’s just what I intend to do.”

Sigh.

P.S. — He made a video so he could say hello to you all.  Shall I post it tomorrow?  ; )

“Oh my goodness, Cara… HE’S CALLING ME!” I yelped from my passenger seat as Cara’s car rolled towards Tennessee.

“Answer it!” she exclaimed, swerving just a bit in the lane.

“No, you answer it!” I replied, secretly hoping that she’d give in and just take the call pretending to be me, even though she lacks that signature southern accent of mine.

The phone kept ringing while we argued back and forth until finally, in fear that the call would be dropped before either of us could even answer, I made myself press the little green button on the top of my phone.  I said a tentative hello and then, across all those miles, I heard his voice for the first time ever.

“Hello, there.”

I don’t remember what all we talked about during the next 56 minutes, but I do remember Cara and I both breaking out into girlish squeals the minute I said goodbye and ended the call.  I was already sure I liked him from everything he had written to me in the weeks leading up to our first phone call, but his voice had sealed the deal for me.  For some reason, ever since I was a young girl, I’ve maintained that the ultimate guy for me would have a British accent.  It wasn’t a thing I ever expected to, you know, have in a boyfriend but I liked to dream aloud about how I would eventually find a guy one day that found everything I did to be “smashing” and “brilliant.”

The phone calls kept coming from there.  We were on a five hour time difference that meant he was getting ready for bed every evening when I was just leaving my office for the day.  We worked out a schedule where we would talk immediately after I got off work and then for longer periods of time on the weekends when the time difference didn’t matter as much.  We talked about everything, from what we were like as children to what we wanted to be like when we were nearing the end of our lives.  We found differences between our cultures, but we found a lot of similarities in our futures.  I left every phone call feeling more sure about him than the one before, but one issue still bothered me: we hadn’t met. 

As fate would have it, months before he even found my blog, British Boyfriend made plans for a trip to the US to attend a convention.  Because of the hectic schedule of the convention, it would be impossible for him to come to me so we decided that I would fly out to where he would be and spend a bit of time getting to know each other before he got busy at the meetings.  We both wanted to meet each other, but I was terrified of several things including but not limited to wondering if he’d still like me when he met me, wondering if I’d like him when I met him and, most importantly, breaking the news to my parental units that I was planning to fly to Kansas City to meet a man who found me on the Internet.

The rest, as they say, is history, I suppose.  I did fly to Kansas City, my flight landing a bit before his connecting flight from England.  When he walked off the plane, I was standing there at the gate and we instantly knew each other when we locked eyes.  We spent the next couple of days getting to know each other before I had to take a flight back home to be available for a project at work.  Our time wasn’t nearly as long as either of us wanted it to be, but we already have plenty of plans in the works that involve me spending some time at his home outside of London and him coming to experience the beauty of my little Tennessee hometown.

It’s not going to be easy, with thousands of miles between us and a girl who is finding it hard to open her heart and mind to the idea of being in a dating relationship.   Friday night dates to the movies will be replaced with long Skype video calls; Saturday morning breakfasts at the cute diner downtown won’t happen without one of us flying for ten straight hours to get to the other one.  We will run to our phones to avoid missing the other’s call, obsessively check our email to see if the other one has written and likely curse the time zone difference that puts us both waking and sleeping at different times.  It isn’t going to be easy, trying to make this work; I have plenty of fear about all the “what ifs” that surround myself and British Boyfriend.

(Me, the morning I flew to meet British Boyfriend for the first time.)

But sometimes you just know a good thing when you see it, even if you don’t see it nearly enough.

– — –

“Because contrary to what the cynics say,

distance is not for the fearful; it’s for the bold.

It’s for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone

in exchange for a little time with the one they love.

It’s for knowing a good thing when they see it,

even if they don’t see it nearly enough.”

Meghan Daum

I didn’t expect him to email me back.

But he did and so, I emailed him back.  I was still wary of communicating with him, remaining convinced that someone was just pretending to be this British guy interested in my blog.  I had narrowed it down to two people in my life who could be accused of this practical joke when I finally decided to confront him in an email and ask him bluntly if he really was who he said he was.

He was who he said he was, with plenty of proof provided.  I was stunned.

We began emailing back and forth each day, obviously interested in each other but keeping it very friendly.  At one point he wanted to call me and I refused, still wary of getting “involved” with someone I didn’t know.  I told him I wanted to get to know him better through email first and he patiently went along with my plan.  We emailed back and forth through the five hour time difference and, one warm afternoon, I found an envelope marked “Airmail” in my postal box.  I didn’t even bother to get to my car before I tore the envelope open and read (and reread) every word he had written to me.

A few days later, I went on a cruise with some friends from college.  I checked my email while I was on the cruise and sent him a couple of short messages, but it certainly wasn’t our typical long daily emails where we continued to get to know one another.  My friends and I analyzed the potential of the relationship over breakfast by the pool and afternoons on the Lido deck.  By the time we had docked back in America, I was genuinely missing him.  I sent him an email from my phone to tell him I was back and, in a move that I’m still surprised at, asked him if he’d still like to call me sometime.  He said he would and I sent my phone number to him, thinking he would call that evening when I had gotten home.  I laid my cell phone in my lap and began talking with my friend Cara as she drove back towards Tennessee, completely unaware of what was going on across the Atlantic Ocean.

Until my phone rang, that is.

Final part of the story… tomorrow.

I’m writing this from a few thousand feet above Missouri as I fly back to Tennessee.  I randomly got seated in the middle of eleven young men fresh out of high school who are flying to basic training for the Army.  The four sitting directly around me have never flown before and I have been laughing until my sides ache at their reaction to every little part of our trip so far.  The best part is the way they call me “ma’am” as in “Ma’am, I am so sorry for the word I just said” whenever we hit the smallest bit of turbulence.  They’re currently working together to come up with an idea on how to convince the flight attendant to give them extra bags of pretzels.  I’m so enamored with their reluctant admissions about how much they’re already missing their mamas back in Missouri that I’m tempted to raid the snack cart and get them some extra pretzels myself.

I’ve been in Missouri for a planned meet-up with, well, my boyfriend.  I’ve hesitated to say much about him before now because we were still trying to blindly navigate everything between us.  On top of that, I honestly just haven’t felt like writing the last few weeks, but I’ll explain that about another day.  I’m guessing you would like the boyfriend story first, no?

A few months ago, this random guy found my blog through a link someone had posted about the blog.  He works for the British government in an area having to do with child services and was obviously intrigued by the fact that I was a foster parent, much less a single one at that.  He began reading my daily posts about trying to survive fostering while combing back through my blog archives to read everything else I’ve written over the past few years.

Meanwhile, I continued living life completely unaware of his existence or the fact that he was following along with my story.  Ironically, right about the time he began reading my blog, I told a couple of my close friends that I felt like I had officially sealed my possibility of ever dating someone when I decided to foster.  Little did I know that there was someone falling for me on the other side of the computer screen — and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

One day a couple of months ago, I wrote a post that really got his attention.  He had wanted to email me for awhile and he decided to email me that day, never thinking I would respond.  His email was very short, kind and typical of the emails I get each week from people who read this blog — except for the fact that he was, in fact, male.

When I read his email to me, I got annoyed.  I was convinced that someone was playing a joke on me, pretending to be a British guy who happened upon my blog.  My reply to him wasn’t rude, but it certainly wasn’t overly friendly, either.  I thanked him for his email and hit send without really giving it another thought.

Until he emailed me back the next morning.

To be continued tomorrow…

(Click image to enlarge.)

Sitting in the airport, waiting to fly back to Tennessee.  Maybe I’ll write the story while I’m 10,000 feet in the air?

Spoiler alert: he’s BRITISH.